Beatniks, unite!
Back when I was a little shaver, there emerged a cultural archetype: the beatnik. Pre-hippie, the beatnik was the American follow-up to the cabaret culture of Europe from a half-generation earlier, and was famously and ingloriously portrayed as Maynard G. Krebbs on the Dobie Gillis Show (a harmless, goateed, shaggy work-shirker); as beret-wearing, poetry-spewing, finger-snapping, bongo-playing preachers of “cool”; as philosophy-reading, coffee-swilling, deep thinkers who hung out in dim-lit cafes and acted dark and mysterious; as jazz-loving, commercialism-eschewing, denizens of the counterculture; and as comic stereotypes on sitcoms and even in cartoons.
The term counterculture may have been born of the beatnik phenomenon. Note that the word wasn’t the more passive “subculture” … instead, it was the more in-your-face “counter” as in “direct opposition” to the social status quo, while embracing pacifism. The beatnik “movement,” if there was such a thing, morphed into the proto-hippie thing on the west coast in the mid ’60s. Within a few short years, there was Woodstock and then hippie went bad, spiraling off down the drug trail, and beatnik became a distant memory (almost a non-memory for most people, I’d wager). Today, I miss that persona … or more to the point … that counterculture. Sure, I expect there is some element of that culture existing in small pockets, semi-camouflaged within the social fabric, maybe viewed as “eccentrics” “weirdos” or “nerds.” Ah, but there used to be a day when their coffee houses and night club cafes provided venues for cool jazz, poets, comics, satirists and blues and folk artists; a gathering place for painters, writers, columnists, educators, activists … and probably FBI informants; a veritable percolator where things were brewing. It was called cafe society. These beatnik dives were no doubt very uncomfortable places for the “hoi polloi,” the everyday, common folk who would likely prefer a nice restaurant or movie for the evening. The beatnik mindset challenged social and intellectual complacency and conformity. They were pests, buzzing around the collective consciousness of society. Beatniks of today, if you’re out there, unite! … start something up … America needs you again (or at least, I do).
Jim Rosenberg said:
Beatniks sound an awful lot like the founders of this site to me. Maybe we could get a statue of “The Thinker” and install it somewhere? :)
October 8th, 2007 at 5:34 pm #
barry said:
That’s a smart post Tom.
There will be an acoustic cafe at UWMC tomorrow at 7 in the roundroom - live music, poetry, maybe some comedy. Come join us - bring your instruments and poems. Any culture is counterculture in opposition to barbarism.
Barry
October 10th, 2007 at 7:58 am #
Tom Neal said:
Thanks for your kind words and invite, Barry. I will be at the WNRB-LP studio tomorrow night doing my show “Roundtrip with Neal at the Wheel,” so won’t be able to attend the cafe. But if you have an intermission, fire up the radio at 8 p.m., tune to 93.3 FM and hear what all the fuss is about!
October 10th, 2007 at 12:22 pm #
Dino Corvino said:
See, this might be my favorite post. Language like water.
October 10th, 2007 at 12:25 pm #
lisastahl said:
Great post. The event tomorrow night sounds like a good time. I got my black turtlenecks out so I am all set.
Tonight the film Hunted Like Animals will be shown at UWMC at 7:00 p.m. Bill Coady wrote about it on the Wausau Blog so I won’t repeat it here. www.wausaublog.org.
October 10th, 2007 at 1:49 pm #
Barry Liss said:
Sorry people, the open mic is next Thursday at 7,
Barry
October 10th, 2007 at 2:25 pm #
queue said:
We could start a cafe philos at a local cafe. It would be a way to draw people together to form community and camaraderie. The Wausau area really needs a jolt to the stale status quo.
As a philosophy student and editor of The Forum I plan to be a pest in Wausau this year. The next issue comes out on the 6th of November. Anyone have any ideas on how I can get those that need to feel uncomfortable and uneasy squirm?
October 11th, 2007 at 8:11 am #
Tom Neal said:
queue …
Cafe concept sounds very worth pursuing. When you say “we could start …” is there a particular “we” you’re proposing? Is there a cafe location you’re thinking of?
Glad you’re planning to be pesky … I think a good way to sow a little squirmy discomfort is to challenge some of those in “the man” positions to appear here or there (personally or in print) to field questions and explain their positions. We do have a number of well-insulated establishment personages in town that need to be drawn into a public dialectic on a range of issues.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:30 am #
lisastahl said:
I went to the Hunted Like Animals film at UWMC last night. It should be required viewing for every person in Wausau or every American for that matter.
http://rebeccasommer.org/documentaries/Hmong/index.php
While on campus, I picked up The Forum. I thumbed through it last night and can’t wait to read it. I found the cover photo especially compelling. Is it online as well?
Where around town (other than campus) can a person pick up The Forum?
Thanks.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:06 am #
Kari Rasmussen said:
There are copies of the Forum outside of the Mint Cafe next to the WDH stand. The cover certainly caught my eye, too.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:27 am #
lisastahl said:
Thanks, Kari!
October 11th, 2007 at 12:06 pm #
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October 14th, 2007 at 11:28 pm #
queue said:
The Forum is distributed all over town. County Market, Trig’s, Pick and Save in Weston and Wausau, both Shopkos, The Library downtown, the Washington Square, Inner Sleeve, the Tea Palace, Starbuck’s, Anne’s, UWSP, and other places my staff dropped off papers.
It will be online shortly after the staff works out the website issues.
I had no ‘we’ or location in mind for the philo cafe. I do think it would be interesting to pick a time and place and try to get the ongoing discussion to run themselves. I think many people in Wausau desire an outlet for critical discussion of ideas ranging from work to politics to happiness. As we can see not just in Wausau, but throughout the country, that if real everyday people do not make decisions for themselves, there is some form the parasite that will do it for them.
October 18th, 2007 at 9:58 am #